A place for everything : the curious history of alphabetical order / Judith Flanders.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flanders, Judith, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Alphabetizing--History.

Alphabetizing.

Information organization--History.

Information organization.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xxviii, 319 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Edition:

First US edition.

Other Title:

Curious history of alphabetical order

Place of Publication:

New York : Basic Books, 2020.

Summary:

Few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order once we've learned it as children. And yet the order of the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays far more of a role in our lives than we usually consider. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to the library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. This magical system of organization not only guides us to the correct bus route or train schedule or the jar of coriander seeds between the cinnamon and the cumin in the supermarket, but it also, in the library or the bookshop, gives us the ability to sift through centuries of thought and writing, of knowledge and literature. Alphabetical order allows us to sort, to file and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. In this entirely original new book, Judith Flanders draws our attention both to the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long and complex history of its rise to prominence.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Chapter 1

A. Is For Antiquity From the Beginning to the Classical World

Chapter 2

B. Is For The Benedictines The Monasteries and the Early Middle Ages

Chapter 3

C. Is For Categories Authorities and Organization, to the Twelfth Century

Chapter 4

D. Is For Distinctiones The High Middle Ages and the Search Tool

Chapter 5

E. Is For Expansion The Reference Work in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Chapter 6

F. Is For Firsts From the Birth of Printing to Library Catalogs in the Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries

Chapter 7

G. Is For Government Bureaucracy and the Office, from the Sixteenth Century to the French Revolution

Chapter 8

H. Is For History Libraries, Research, and Extracting in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Chapter 9

I. Is For Index Cards From Copy Clerks to Office Supplies in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 10

Y. Is For Y2K From the Phone Book to Hypertext in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 270-291) and index.

ISBN:

9781541675070

154167507X

OCLC:

1143631587